author
Bishop of Hierapolis Saint Papias
An early Christian bishop remembered for listening closely to the traditions of the first generations of believers, he became one of the most important witnesses to the world behind the New Testament. Although his major work survives only in fragments, it still shapes how historians think about the origins of the Gospels.
1 Audiobook
The writings of the Apostolic Fathers
by Pope Clement I, active 2nd century Hermas, Bishop of Antioch Saint Ignatius, Bishop of Hierapolis Saint Papias, Bishop of Smyrna Saint Polycarp
About the author
Papias of Hierapolis was an early Christian bishop in Phrygia, in what is now Turkey, and is usually placed in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries. He is counted among the Apostolic Fathers, a group of early writers valued for their closeness to the first generations of the church.
He is best known for a five-book work usually translated as Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. The book itself is lost, but later writers preserved excerpts from it. Those surviving passages made Papias especially important to church history because they preserve early traditions about Jesus and about figures such as Mark and Matthew.
Ancient sources describe him as deeply interested in living testimony, preferring what he could learn from people connected to the apostles over secondhand reports in books. Even though only fragments remain, his voice still matters because it offers a rare glimpse of how Christians in the early second century remembered the teachings of Jesus and the beginnings of the Gospel tradition.